respublica

Speed up when merging

Just don't understand why St. Louis drivers don't understand the concept of merging quickly onto interstates. Drive 64/40 or any other freeway and you'll see cars slowly heading down the merge lane especially at Kingshighway and Hampton going west. The idea is to get up to highway speed, but no, they creep along until the cars in the right lane have to almost stop and let them in or move over.

Speed up when merging

Just don't understand why St. Louis drivers don't understand the concept of merging quickly onto interstates. Drive 64/40 or any other freeway and you'll see cars slowly heading down the merge lane especially at Kingshighway and Hampton going west. The idea is to get up to highway speed, but no, they creep along until the cars in the right lane have to almost stop and let them in or move over.

St Louisans seem to watch a lot of TV

New Nielson survey results on TV watching by city, show that St. Louis is second only to Pittsurgh in the numbers of people who do live viewing. And, St. Louis leads the nation in Time Shifted Viewing. I had to look up the meaning of Time Shifted Viewing, which tells you how little programming we look at.

Time Shifted Viewing is the recording of programs (TiVo, DVR etc) to storage for watching at a later time. This is something we never, ever do, but know many people who use this method of watching TV more than any other.

San Francisco watched the least amount of TV.

The big fat squeezeable gas nozzles are gone

Hurray! St. Louis gas stations are rapidly removing those awful gas pump nozzles with the rippled black plastic sleeves and returning to the skinny hoses and a metal nozzle which fits right in the gas tank opening.

The fat sleeves were originally installed to combat ground level ozone but are no longer needed because cars now have built-in carbon canisters that capture vapors before they escape. This makes me very happy, I noticed this change last week when I got gas. Wow, that black awkward, hard to use sleeve was gone!

The hardest part in using that old nozzle was in trying to fill a gas can for the lawnmower, it meant pushing down on that plastic really hard and often having it spring back and splatter gas all over. Yay. They're gone.

A question about fried chicken

I'm not sure exactly what reddit is, but I'm seeing links to it more and more lately, mostly on Twitter from St. Louis. Anyway, a question was asked on St. Louis Reddit "What is the best fried chicken in the area. I've got a wicked craving that KFC simply won't satisfy."

This received two responses, of which I agree with. The other I can't speak too never having been to Hodaks.

But the second answer is YES!  "

"I used to think the best was Hodak's. But these days I have to give the nod to Porter's. (On Big Bend in Maplewood across from the Deer Creek Center.)

If Porter's is slammed, you can go a couple of blocks over in the neighborhood to The Piccadilly at Manhattan. They have KILLER fried chicken. (My wife likes it better than Porter's)

And Porter's ALWAYS makes your order up fresh. Nothing sits around under a warmer."

Porter's is just soooooo good and so is Picadilly's. Picadilly's is a go and sit down bar/restaurant rather than carry out, but their chicken is unreal.  We call Porter's and order a carry out a lot, mainly Sunday nights and Picadilly at Manhattan is our default "go out to eat" place. 

Don't be too hasty about using your cards at Schnucks

It's been 6 weeks since Schnucks shoppers began learning that their debit and credit cards had been compromised. Publically the company has hinted that they have the problem contained but this is just not the case so be careful, use cash or checks.

Our son in law's debit card was hacked and he received a new one last week. He used it with the confidence things were now ok. But it was hacked right off the bat. Schnucks, for all the good they do in local communities, have just not been able to solve this problem. So just don't use cards at Schnucks or go to Shop N Save or Dierbergs.

When you get bulletins from MSD...

...you know we've had way too much rain.

The St. Louis Metropolitan Sanitary District put out an informational message this morning with the headline: What to do after a basement backup.

The advice includes:

Do not enter the area if water levels have reached the electrical outlets

When in doubt turn off the electric supply.  Of course that would involve walking through deep water in the basement.

Call MSD and they'll send someone to assess the problem and cause of the backup

MSD will give you a brochure on the best way to clean up the nasty mess

2.4 million cards compromised

So Schnucks chooses a Sunday afternoon more than a month after customer cards began showing signs of being hacked to publically announce that more than 2.4 million debit or credit cards had been compromised after use in their stores. I've watched in amazement as intelligent, informed looking people continued to slide their cards through the checkout machines at Schnucks the past few weeks seemingly trusting that everything was fine. And we know thanks to local news reporters last week who still had their cards messed with that it isn't quite over.

For a metro area the size of St. Louis that is a lot of hacked cards. KSDK has the entire list of Schnucks stores which had cards compromised and the dates in which it happened. Scroll down the page to find them. It looks like the Collinsville store was not affected. How odd. 79 of its 100 stores were.

Update to the Ellisville Fiasco

P-D columnist Bill McClellan wrote the best summary of the goings on in Ellisville I've seen so far. He did it with humor and truth, two things which are often the same.

You can have good government or fun government. I am in the fun government camp.

When you have fun government, you have participatory democracy. People show up for meetings. They get angry. They shout. They pay attention.

Ellisville is the latest example of fun government. 

The mayor has been impeached.

To be fair about this, you can impeach a mayor even with a good government. But with a good government, the impeachment would have something to do with malfeasance. Maybe even fraud.

In a fun government, it’s Mad Hatter stuff. 

And there's so much more fun from McClellan

 

The fiasco that is Ellisville

If you follow any local news beyond the Cardinals, you've seen reports of last night's impeachment of the Mayor of Ellisville, Adam Paul. Paul was elected last April defeating two people who are now on the council. A third member of the council is the mayor Paul succeeded, Matt Pirrello.

Paul ran on a platform which stood in opposition to a proposed Walmart and the use of TIF funds to build it. The previous council was in favor including the 3 who ran against him. Last year's election seems to have played out this way: Mayor Pirrello was term limited out for mayor and so ran for council. Michelle Murray and Dawn Anglin were on the council with their terms still having a year to go and ran for mayor. They lost to Paul but kept their council seats. Currently they can no longer serve because their terms are up and are term limited out. Two new members of the council were elected last week to replace them and stand with Paul in the Walmart matter and other issues. The voters have spoken...twice.

In effect the move to have the impeachment vote took place (5-1) before the new members took their seats.

Looking at this from the outside is problematic since we aren't privvy to all the ins and outs of Elllisville politics, but it does appear that- 1 Mayor Paul is a young man who came in gangbusters to do what he said he would do while campaigning and did get the majority of votes from city voters. Sometimes patience is a virtue but it's often lost on the young and motivated person.

And 2, it appears the former mayor now councilman and the city attorney and maybe a number of councilmen did work behind the scenes almost from the beginning of Pau's term to neutralize him or get him out. I wonder how many illegal private unofficial conversations went on between all of those people.

With the impeachment the council has full authority to name a interim mayor and will they outgoing council do this or wait and let the new one have the responsibility? Meanwhile Mayor Paul said he will take this matter to a real court and not leave the final decision to what he called a Kangaroo Court.

The most feel good part of the story last night? The public impeachment meeting was held at St. John's Lutheran Church in Ellisville, a place big enough to hold the crowd. And, the church members put out free cookies and coffee for everyone.